The Circle

participation, in the company Circle and your wider Circle. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
Mae watched Gina activate the screen, and felt a thrill. She’d never had such an

---

elaborate arrangement before. Three screens for someone so low on the ladder! Only at
the Circle.
“Okay, rst I want to go back to your second screen,” Gina said. “I don’t think you’ve
activated CircleSearch. Let’s do that.” An elaborate, three-dimensional map of the campus
appeared. “This is pretty simple, and just allows you to nd anyone on campus in case
you need a face-to-face.”
Gina pointed to a pulsing red dot.
“Here’s you. You’re red hot! I’m kidding.” As if recognizing that might have been
considered inappropriate, Gina quickly moved on. “Didn’t you say you knew Annie? Let’s
type in her name.” A blue dot appeared in the Old West. “She’s in her o ce, surprise
surprise. Annie is a machine.”
Mae smiled. “She is.”
“I’m so jealous you know her so well,” Gina said, smiling but brie y and
unconvincingly. “And over here you’ll see a cool new app, which sort of gives us a history
of the building every day. You can see when each staffer checked in every day, when they
left the building. This gives us a really nice sense of the life of the company. This part you
don’t have to update yourself, of course. If you go to the pool, your ID automatically
updates that on the feed. And outside of the movement, any additional commentary
would be up to you, and of course would be encouraged.”
“Commentary?” Mae asked.
“You know, like what you thought of lunch, a new feature at the gym, anything. Just
basic ratings and likes and comments. Nothing out of the ordinary, and of course all input
helps us do a better job at serving the Circle community. Now that commentary is done
right here,” she said, and revealed that every building and room could be clicked on, and
within, she could add any comments about anything or anyone.
“So that’s your second screen. It’s about your coworkers, your team, and it’s about
nding people in the physical space. Now it’s on to the really fun stu . Screen three. This
is where your main social and Zing feeds appear. I heard you weren’t a Zing user?”
Mae admitted she hadn’t been, but wanted to be.
“Great,” Gina said. “So now you have a Zing account. I made up a name for you:
MaeDay. Like the war holiday. Isn’t that cool?”
Mae wasn’t so sure about the name, and couldn’t remember a holiday by that name.
“And I connected your Zing account with the total Circle community, so you just got
10,041 new followers! Pretty cool. In terms of your own zinging, we’d expect about ten
or so a day, but that’s sort of a minimum. I’m sure you’ll have more to say than that. Oh,
and over here’s your playlist. If you listen to music while you work, the feed
automatically sends that playlist out to everyone else, and it goes into the collective
playlist, which ranks the most-played songs in any given day, week, month. It has the top
one hundred songs campuswide, but you can also slice it a thousand ways—top-played
hip-hop, indie, country, anything. You’ll get recommendations based on what you play,
and what others with similar taste play—it’s all cross-pollinating while you’re working.
Make sense?”
Mae nodded.

---

“Now, next to the Zing feed, you’ll see the window for your primary social feed. You’ll
also see that we split it into two parts, the InnerCircle social feed, and your external
social, that’s your OuterCircle. Isn’t that cute? You can merge them, but we nd it helpful
to see the two distinct feeds. But of course the OuterCircle is still in the Circle, right?
Everything is. Make sense so far?”
Mae said it did.
“I can’t believe you’ve been here a week without being on the main social feed. You’re
about to have your world rocked.” Gina tapped Mae’s screen and Mae’s InnerCircle
stream became a torrent of messages pouring down the monitor.
“See, you’re getting all last week’s stu , too. That’s why there’s so many. Wow, you
really missed a lot.”
Mae followed the counter on the bottom of the screen, calculating all the messages sent
to her from everyone else at the Circle. The counter paused at 1,200. Then 4,400. The
numbers scrambled higher, stopping periodically but finally settling at 8,276.
“That was last week’s messages? Eight thousand?”
“You can catch up,” Gina said brightly. “Maybe even tonight. Now, let’s open up your
regular social account. We call it OuterCircle, but it’s the same pro le, same feed as
you’ve had for years. Mind if I open it up?”
Mae didn’t mind. She watched as her social pro le, the one she’d rst set up years ago,
now appeared on her third screen, next to the InnerCircle feed. A cascade of messages and
photos, a few hundred, filled the monitor.
“Okay, looks like you have some catching up to do here, too,” Gina said. “A feast! Have
fun.”
“Thank you,” Mae said. She tried to sound as excited as she could. She needed Gina to
like her.
“Oh wait. One more thing. I should explain message hierarchy. Shit. I almost forgot
message hierarchy. Dan would kill me. Okay, so you know that your rst-screen CE
responsibilities are paramount. We have to serve our customers with our full attention
and our full hearts. So that’s understood.”
“It is.”
“On your second screen, you might get messages from Dan and Jared, or Annie, or
anyone directly supervising your work. Those messages inform the minute-to-minute
quality of your service. So that would be your second priority. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“The third screen is your social, Inner- and OuterCircle. But these messages aren’t, like,
super uous. They’re just as important as any other messages, but are prioritized third.
And sometimes they’re urgent. Keep an eye on the InnerCircle feed in particular, because
that’s where you’ll hear about sta meetings, mandatory gatherings, and any breaking
news. If there’s a Circle notice that’s really pressing, that’ll be marked in orange.
Something extremely urgent will prompt a message on your phone, too. You keep that in
view?” Mae nodded at her phone, resting just below the screens on her desk. “Good,”
Gina said. “So those are the priorities, with your fourth priority your own OuterCircle
participation. Which is just as important as anything else, because we value your work-

---

life balance, you know, the calibration between your online life here at the company and
outside it. I hope that’s clear. Is it?”
“It is.”
“Good. So I think you’re all set. Any questions?”
Mae said she was fine.
Gina’s head tilted skeptically, indicating she knew that Mae actually had many
questions still, but didn’t want to ask them for fear of looking uninformed. Gina stood up,
smiled, took a step back, but then stopped. “Crap. Forgot one more thing.” She crouched
next to Mae, typed for a few seconds, and a number appeared on the third screen, looking
much like her aggregate CE score. It said: M
AE
H
OLLAND
: 10,328.
“This is your Participation Rank, PartiRank for short. Some people here call it the
Popularity Rank, but it’s not really that. It’s just an algorithm-generated number that
takes into account all your activity in the InnerCircle. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“It takes into account zings, exterior followers of your intra-company zings, comments
on your zings, your comments on others’ zings, your comments on other Circlers’ pro les,
your photos posted, attendance at Circle events, comments and photos posted about those
events—basically it collects and celebrates all you do here. The most active Circlers are
ranked highest of course. As you can see, your rank is low now, but that’s because you’re
new and we just activated your social feed. But every time you post or comment or
attend anything, that gets factored in, and you’ll see your rank change accordingly. That’s
where the fun comes in. You post, you rise in the rankings. A bunch of people like your
post, and you really shoot up. It moves all day. Cool?”
“Very,” Mae said.
“We started you with a little boost—otherwise you’d be 10,411. And again, it’s just for
fun. You’re not judged by your rank or anything. Some Circlers take it very seriously, of
course, and we love it when people want to participate, but the rank is really just a fun
way to see how your participation manifests itself vis-à-vis the overall Circle community.
Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay then. You know how to get hold of me.”
And with that, Gina turned and left.
Mae opened the intra-company stream and began. She was determined to get through all
the Inner and Outer feeds that night. There were company-wide notices about each day’s
menus, each day’s weather, each day’s words of the wise—last week’s aphorisms were
from MLK, Gandhi, Salk, Mother Teresa and Steve Jobs. There were notices about each
day’s campus visits: a pet adoption agency, a state senator, a Congressman from
Tennessee, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières. Mae found out, with a sting of
remorse, that she’d missed, that very morning, a visit from Muhammad Yunus, winner of
the Nobel Prize. She plowed through the messages, every one, looking for anything she
would have reasonably been expected to answer personally. There were surveys, at least

---

fty of them, gauging the Circlers’ opinions on various company policies, on optimal
dates for upcoming gatherings, interest groups, celebrations and holiday breaks. There
were dozens of clubs soliciting members and notifying all of meetings: there were cat-
owner groups—at least ten—a few rabbit groups, six reptile groups, four of them
adamantly snake-exclusive. Most of all, there were groups for dog-owners. She counted
twenty-two, but was sure that wasn’t all of them. One of the groups dedicated to the
owners of very small dogs, Lucky Lapdogs, wanted to know how many people would join
a weekend club for walks and hikes and support; Mae ignored this one. Then, realizing
that ignoring it would only prompt a second, more urgent, message, she typed a message,
explaining that she didn’t have a dog. She was asked to sign a petition for more vegan
options at lunch; she did. There were nine messages from various work-groups within the
company, asking her to join their subCircles for more speci c updates and information
sharing. For now she joined the ones dedicated to crochet, soccer, and Hitchcock.
There seemed to be a hundred parents’ groups— rst-time parents, divorced parents,
parents of autistic children, parents of Guatemalan adoptees, Ethiopian adoptees, Russian
adoptees. There were seven improv comedy groups, nine swim teams—there had been an
inter-sta meet last Wednesday, hundreds of swimmers participating, and a hundred
messages were about the contest, who won, some glitch with the results, and how a
mediator would be on campus to settle any lingering questions or grievances. There were
visits, ten a day at least, from companies presenting innovative new products to the
Circle. New fuel-e cient cars. New fair-trade sneakers. New locally sourced tennis
rackets. There were meetings of every conceivable department—R&D, search, social,
outreach, professional networking, philanthropic, ad sales, and with a plummeting of her
stomach, Mae saw that she’d missed a meeting, deemed “pretty much mandatory” for all
newbies. That had been last Thursday. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Well, stupid, she
answered herself. They did tell you. Right here.
“Shit,” she said.
By ten p.m., she’d made her way through all the intra-company messages and alerts,
and now turned to her own OuterCircle account. She hadn’t visited in six days, and found
118 new notices from that day alone. She decided to plow through, newest to oldest.
Most recently, one of her friends from college had posted a message about having the
stomach u, and a long thread followed, with friends making suggestions about remedies,
some o ering sympathy, some posting photos meant to cheer her up. Mae liked two of
the photos, liked three of the comments, posted her own well wishes, and sent a link to a
song, “Puking Sally,” that she’d found. That prompted a new thread, 54 notices, about the
song and the band that wrote it. One of the friends on the thread said he knew the bassist
in the band, and then looped him into the conversation. The bassist, Damien Ghilotti, was
in New Zealand, was a studio engineer now, but was happy to know that “Puking Sally”
was still resonating with the u-ridden. His post thrilled all involved, and another 129
notices appeared, everyone thrilled to hear from the actual bassist from the band, and by
the end of the thread, Damien Ghilotti was invited to play a wedding, if he wanted, or
visit Boulder, or Bath, or Gainesville, or St. Charles, Illinois, any time he happened to be
passing through, and he would have a place to stay and a home-cooked meal. Upon the

---

mention of St. Charles, someone asked if anyone from there had heard about Tim
Jenkins, who was ghting in Afghanistan; they’d seen some mention of a kid from Illinois
being shot to death by an Afghan insurgent posing as a police o cer. Sixty messages later
the respondents had determined that it was a di erent Tim Jenkins, this one from
Rantoul, Illinois, not St. Charles. There was relief all around, but soon the thread had
been overtaken by a multiparticipant debate about the e cacy of that war, U.S. foreign
policy in general, whether or not we won in Vietnam or Grenada or even WWI, and the
ability of the Afghans to self-govern, and the opium trade nancing the insurgents, and
the possibility of legalization of any and all illicit drugs in America and Europe. Someone
mentioned the usefulness of marijuana in alleviating glaucoma, and someone else
mentioned it was helpful for those with MS, too, and then there was a frenetic exchange
between three family members of MS patients, and Mae, feeling some darkness opening
its wings within her, signed off.
Mae could no longer keep her eyes open. Though she’d only made it through three days
of her social backlog, she shut down and made for the parking lot.

---

Tuesday morning’s chute was lighter than Monday’s, but the activity on her third screen
kept her in her chair for the day’s rst three hours. Before the third screen, there had
always been a lull, maybe ten or twelve seconds, between when she’d answered a query
and when she knew whether or not the answer had been satisfying; she’d used the time to
memorize the boilerplates and do a few follow-ups, every so often to check her phone.
But now that became more challenging. The third-screen feed dropped forty new
InnerCircle messages every few minutes, fteen or so OuterCircle posts and zings, and
Mae used every available moment of downtime to quickly scroll through, make sure there
was nothing that demanded her immediate attention, and then come back to her main
screen.
By the end of the morning, the ow was manageable, even exhilarating. The company
had so much going on, so much humanity and good feeling, and was pioneering on all
fronts, that she knew she was being improved just by being in the Circlers’ proximity. It
was like a well-curated organic grocery store: you knew, by shopping there, that you
were healthier; you couldn’t make a bad choice, because everything had been vetted
already. Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene pool
was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone
endeavored, constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their
knowledge, disseminate it to the world.
By lunchtime, though, she was wiped out, and very much looking forward to sitting,
with her cerebral cortex removed, for an hour, on the lawn, with Annie, who had insisted
on it.
At 11:50, though, a second-screen message from Dan appeared: You got a few mins?
She told Annie she might be late, and when she arrived to Dan’s o ce, he was leaning
against the doorjamb. He smiled sympathetically at Mae, but with a raised eyebrow, as if
there was something about Mae that was perplexing him, something he couldn’t put his
nger on. He extended his arm into the o ce, and she slipped past him. He closed the
door.
“Sit down, Mae. You know Alistair, I assume?”
She hadn’t seen the man sitting in the corner, but now that she saw him, she knew she
didn’t know him. He was tall, in his late twenties, with a careful swirl of sandy brown
hair. He was positioned diagonally against a rounded chair, his thin frame resting sti y,
like a two-by-four. He didn’t stand to meet her, so Mae extended her hand to him.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
Alistair sighed with great resignation and extended his hand as if he were about to
touch something washed ashore and rotting.
Mae’s mouth went dry. There was something very wrong.
Dan sat down. “Now, I hope we can make this right as soon as possible,” he said.
“Would you like to start, Mae?”
The two men looked at her. Dan’s eyes were steady, while Alistair’s look was hurt but
expectant. Mae had no idea what to say, no idea what was happening. As the silence
festered and grew, Alistair blinked furiously, holding back tears.
“I can’t believe this,” he managed to say.

---

Dan turned to him. “Alistair, c’mon. We know you’re hurting, but let’s keep it in
perspective.” Dan turned to Mae. “I’ll point out the obvious. Mae, we’re talking about
Alistair’s Portugal brunch.”
Dan let the words linger, expecting Mae to jump in, but Mae had no idea what those
words meant: Alistair’s Portugal brunch? Could she say she had no idea what that meant?
She knew she couldn’t. She’d been late to the feed. This must have something to do with
that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She knew she would have to tread water until she could gure
out what all this was about.
“That’s a good start,” Dan said. “Right, Alistair?”
Alistair shrugged.
Mae continued fumbling. What did she know? There had been a brunch, that much was
certain. And clearly she had not been there. The brunch was planned by Alistair, and now
he was hurt. All this was reasonable to assume.
“I wish I could have been there,” she ventured, and immediately saw slight signs of
con rmation in their faces. She was onto something. “But I wasn’t sure if …” Now she
took a leap. “I wasn’t sure if I was welcome, being so new here.”
Their faces softened. Mae smiled, knowing she’d hit the right note. Dan shook his head,
happy to have his assumption—that Mae was not an inherently bad person—con rmed.
He got up from his chair, came around his desk and leaned against it.
“Mae, have we not made you feel welcome?” he asked.
“No, you have! You really have. But I’m not a member of Alistair’s team, and I wasn’t
quite sure what the rules were about, you know, members of my team attending the
brunches of more seasoned members of other teams.”
Dan nodded. “See, Alistair? I told you it was easily explained.” Now Alistair was sitting
upright, as if ready to engage again.
“Well of course you’re welcome,” he said, patting her knee playfully. “Even if you’re a
little oblivious.”
“Now Alistair …”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and took a deep breath. “I’ve got it under control now. I’m very
happy.”
There were a few more statements of apology and laughs about understandings and
misunderstandings, and communications and ow and mistakes and the order of the
universe, and finally it was time to let it go. They stood.
“Let’s hug it out,” Dan said. And they did, forming a tight scrum of newfound
communion.
By the time Mae was back at her desk, a message was waiting for her.